Slack, the messaging tool for business that’s changing the way people talk at work, is gaining traction in areas that even the company itself didn’t anticipate: it’s quietly killing Internet Relay Chat (IRC). For many years, IRC was the chat solution of choice for communities looking to collaborate…

O n a hillside in the southeast corner of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge Massachusetts, a human’s entire life stands summed up in six lines: ED… A GRA…ATE…. CLASS OF…. BORN 19…. DIED 3….AGED… The lines adorn the remains of a house-shaped slab of sandstone. Most of its inscribed face has sheared…

China used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the U.S. used in the entire 20th Century. It’s a statistic so mind-blowing that it stunned Bill Gates and inspired haiku . But can it be true, and, if so, how? Yes, China’s economy has grown at an extraordinary rate, and it has more than four times…

The accident happened right after Christmas. On a rainy, cold Texas morning in late December of last year, a driver going westbound on Interstate 20 drifted to the eastbound side of the road and hit the oncoming Nissan Rogue head on. Michael and Beth Hamelin were inside the eastbound car. Both…

Ali Mese Sep 10, 2014 Finally the SMS arrived: “Tomorrow morning 5am, flight number AZ610 from Rome to NewYork.” An SMS hitting my BlackBerry on Sunday evenings used to decide my destination and client for the coming week. I was working for one of the top three global strategy consulting firms. A…

BOOK REVIEWED The Glass Cage: Automation and Us , by Nicholas Carr, W. W. Norton, $26.95 W hat does it mean to be a technology critic in today’s America? And what can technology criticism accomplish? The first question seems easy: to be a technology critic in America now is to oppose that bastion of…

The first test of the hydrogen bomb was conducted at Elugelab, a Pacific island that was destroyed by the blast in 1952. Credit Los Alamos National Laboratory PHILADELPHIA — For all its horrific power, the atom bomb — leveler of Hiroshima and instant killer of some 80,000 people — is but a pale…

Residents in the town of Pahoa on Hawaii’s Big Island talk about what it’s like to live in the path of a very, very slow-moving natural disaster. Credit Audrey McAvoy/Associated Press PAHOA, Hawaii — If a disaster movie played out in slow motion, it might look a bit like the Puna District on the Big…

She took off the last of her clothes and pulled me closer, kissing me and tightening her embrace. I thought I knew what would be next. I reached for a condom and began to tear it open. Suddenly, she said she needed to go and fetched an Uber; she was gone within minutes. She’d been delightful and I’d…

Roman Mittermayr Feb 27, 2015 Unlisted A still from “Truman Show”, probably copyrighted by Paramount Pictures. I don’t know for how long I’ll leave this post up here, so read it while you can. Fake Empire It’s better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody — Matt Damon What does it take to hit #1…

Kill your voice plan. Your new iPhone is just a little tablet—the carriers simply won’t admit it. Tavis Coburn Don’t buy another phone ever again. That’s a weird thing for us to say, right? We’re WIRED! But by the end of last year, it was fancy-ice clear that the distinction between phones and the…

Welcome to this week’s installment of “Don’t Mess with Geophysics.” Last week, we learned about the possible destabilization of the Totten Glacier of East Antarctica, which could unleash over 11 feet of sea level rise in coming centuries. And now this week brings news of another potential mega-scale…

Ellie Lobel was ready to die. Then she was attacked by bees. Christie Wilcox hears how venom can be a saviour. “I moved to California to die.” Ellie Lobel was 27 when she was bitten by a tick and contracted Lyme disease. And she was not yet 45 when she decided to give up fighting for survival.…

Flickr user: St3f4n A technique for editing genes while they reside in intact chromosomes has been a real breakthrough. Literally . In 2013, Science magazine named it the runner-up for breakthrough-of-the-year, and its developers won the 2015 Breakthrough Prize . The system being honored is called…

LONDON — In March 1968, Robert F. Kennedy spoke about a governing elite who had lost touch with ordinary people and judged the state of the nation by gross national product. “Gross national product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage,” he…

It happens so quickly you almost don’t believe it: Seth Robertson and Viet Tran ignite a fire, snap on their low-rumbling bass frequency generator and extinguish the flames in seconds. And even after you’ve seen it over and over, it’s still unbelievable. But the two senior engineering majors at…

Every lesson at Japanese schools starts with a simultaneous bow. "Let's try that again because your posture wasn't good," says a teacher to a room full of six and seven-year-olds. She then reminds the children to have their pencil boxes, notepads and textbooks on top of each other and placed at the…

Are we all just puppets on a string? Most people would like to assume that they are free agents – their fate lies in their own hands. But they’d be wrong. Often, we are as helpless as a marionette, being jerked about by someone else’s subtle influence. Without even feeling the tug, we do their…

During the Stalin years, there were tight restrictions on science fiction in the Soviet Union. Writers were pressured and boxed in, urged to stick to themes of adventure, space travel and the glowing prospect of Soviet scientific and technological achievements. But after Stalin's death and the…

T he bags are packed, the car is loaded, and the neighbor will pick up the mail. Now there’s just one last thing to do before heading out the door for vacation: It’s time to turn off the dog. You lead Sparky to his fluffy bed inside a small chamber filled with a continuous stream of hydrogen sulfide…

Why Not Utopia? Credit Kristian Hammerstad SOME quake in terror as we approach the Terminator scenario, in which clever machines take over the world. After all, it isn’t sci-fi when Stephen Hawking says things like, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human…

Slideshow Slideshow White Suit in Chicagoland, Illinois, 2013. Slideshow Backview of Bedlam, Illinois, 2013. Slideshow Bedlam Front View, Illinois, 2013. Slideshow Tippmann City, Pennsylvania, 2009. Slideshow Crash Site Field 2, Pennsylvania, 2009. Slideshow Mutant Baby Rescue, Biowar, Pennsylvania,…

Cultura Science/Getty Images Air-gapped systems, which are isolated from the Internet and are not connected to other systems that are connected to the Internet, are used in situations that demand high security because they make siphoning data from them difficult. Air-gapped systems are used in…

I am working out of a massive office building in one of those little commercial compounds this week. The entire area has all sorts of nice things – a paper-printing shop, coffee, sushi, burritos, dry cleaners, even food carts most days. Cellphone coverage is near 100%, free WiFi is everywhere, lots…

Top-secret documents obtained by the CBC show Canada's electronic spy agency has developed a vast arsenal of cyberwarfare tools alongside its U.S. and British counterparts to hack into computers and phones in many parts of the world, including in friendly trade countries like Mexico and hotspots…

Just as the Nasdaq Composite Index surges to the cusp of the record high set during the dot-com-era, the excitement about China’s Internet boom is fading. Half of the 14 Chinese dot-coms that debuted in the U.S. last year are now trading below their initial sale prices. Even Alibaba Group Holding…

You Can Also Listen On About This Episode Neil deGrasse Tyson explores the future of humanity with one of the men forging that future: billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors. Join us as Neil and Elon talk about NASA funding, getting humans excited for the colonization of…

Editor's Note : Thomas Bukowski is Lead Engineer at Watsi . Watsi is on a mission to "turn passion, ramen, and code into a movement to provide healthcare to every person on the planet." Watsi has now raised over $3.5M to fund medical care for patients across the world. And it all started with a…

The UK is to establish the largest, continuous marine reserve in the world, around the Pitcairn Islands. The Pacific zone will cover 834,000 sq km (322,000 sq miles) - more than twice the land area of the British Isles. The intention is to protect the wealth of ocean life from illegal fishing…

I’m trying to free your mind Neo. But I can only show you the door. You’re the one who has to walk through it. — Morpheus, The Matrix I have it all, but I feel a void… I think I fell asleep at the wheel of my life. I’m my very own “Walking Dead.” It’s odd too because I’m successful by most measures.…

Every field has its raging debates among impassioned experts, and the art world is no exception. Case in point: some art historians long suspected that master painter Pablo Picasso used common house paint rather than the oil paints traditionally used in his era, which would make him the first known…

The world could suffer a 40 per cent shortfall in water in just 15 years unless countries dramatically change their use of the resource, a UN report warned Friday. Many underground water reserves are already running low, while rainfall patterns are predicted to become more erratic with climate…

Jacob Silverman is the author of “ Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection ,” from which this article is adapted. Twenty years ago, the conditions facing the technology industry were not unlike those today. A burgeoning consumer market, declining manufacturing costs and…

Colin Dickey | Longreads | March 2015 | 13 minutes (3,199 words) We docked just past midnight, the sun to the south shining through a thin layer of clouds. It was late June, and the sun hadn’t set for months in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard; it wouldn’t set again until the end of September. For…

But if edible insects are to hit the mainstream, the infrastructure to support their industrial scale production needs some work, says Daniel Imrie-Situnayake, co-founder of Tiny Farms, a California-based company on a mission to turn bugs from a novelty to a mass market food ingredient. At current…

All Illustrations by Chie Ushio . Elderly locals are better than trendy guide books at directing you to the heart of a city Tom Downey Mar 5, 2015 Until a visit to Buenos Aires a few weeks ago, it had been 10 years since I’d been to Argentina. The location I remembered best from that first trip was…

I can offer only the sketchiest explanations for how I came to occupy the top floor of a pleasantly wide banker’s brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, where the sun pours in through two high windows until midafternoon, glancing off the painted surface of the desk where I have lately been composing…